| 4/11/2014 | 04/11/2013 | 04/11/2012 | 04/11/2011 | 04/11/2010 | |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Active Rigs | 190 | 187 | 208 | 173 | 105 |
RBN Energy: The road to New England. A continuation on the natural gas constraints in New England. There is NO natural gas storage in New England. Talk about NIMBYs.
There are more and more stories suggesting that the Bakken experience won't be replicated outside of North America. Now another story today: the Financial Post is reporting that Statoil is disappointed with shale outside of the United States. The second story line is how much money Statoil has spent in exploration only to come up empty.
In a push to find new shale basins globally as it expands outside its traditional base, the energy major has invested in shale acreage in Russia with Rosneft, in Germany with Wintershall and in Australia with PetroFrontier Corp .
The company, which has made huge conventional discoveries off Brazil and Tanzania and in Canada in the past few years, is also scouring regions from Argentina to China for more shale opportunities as U.S. acquisition prices have soared.Another record smashed in the Bakken. This is an incredible story. The world's largest truck wash is located south of Williston, in Alexander, North Dakota. Bakken.com is reporting:
Old records get smashed just about every day in the oil patch, so it’s no real surprise that it now may be home to the world’s largest truck wash.
At least that’s owner Jeff Schutz’s take on the scale of the Kwik n Kleen at the corner of U.S. Highway 85 and N.D. Highway 68 just outside Alexander.
He’s developed wash stations throughout the Midwest and a fleet of mobile wash units and he’s sure there isn’t a bigger truck wash anywhere on the planet in terms of speed and water capacity. He opened Kwik n Kleen four days ago, good timing since just about every rig out there is sporting a few layers of mud and grime from greasy roads and springtime slush.
If the $6 million wash is one for the Guinness World Records book, like Schutz says his research finds, it stands to reason everything about it is sized off the charts.
Trucks roll through a 200-foot-long wash bay spaced with electronic eyes that start and stop all the wash, chemical and rinse cycles along the full length.
But besides the sheer length and height of the wash, which occupies the highway corner with same dominance an indoor sports arena would, for Schutz, it’s all about the water.
There’s not a drain in the wash and he purposely designed it that way.
It likely is, considering a full semi truck wash requires 30,000 gallons of water at the rate of 450 gallons per minute when both truck wash bays and a car wash bay are running at the same time.
All that water isn’t cheap and nor is there an overwhelming supply off the Western Area Water Supply pipeline, which transports Missouri River water treated at Williston throughout the oil patch.
So the wash is all about recycled water.
An area between the two truck bays has all the pumps, tanks and pipes of a municipal water treatment facility, including a large-scale reverse osmosis plant that provides the streak-free water that’s used in the final rinse.
But most of the space is used to collect used wash water in a settling pond bigger and deeper than a swimming pool where dirt and debris fall to the bottom and the cleanest surface water overflows into a separate pond that’s filtered and reused in the wash cycles.
Schutz says 98 percent of the water used in the wash is recycled and only 2 percent is fresh water used in the rinse cycles.There's a lot more at the link.
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The Wall Street Journal
Top story: the stock market sell-off yesterday. It was all about tech, and health services.
Ms Sebelius to resign. Fail.
Insider trading coming from the Obama administration. Market-sensitive information vitally important to health-insurance companies has once again reached Wall Street before the public, and this time it appears to have come from the government itself.
At least nine people killed in a three-vehicle crash involving a bus carrying high-school students on a visit to college. FedEx truck crosses median and slams into bus, head-on collision.
Sebelius exits, but health-care war endures.
GOP budget plan narrowly passes House. I've pretty much given up on the House. Lots of talk; little action. Mr Boehner needs to join Ms Sebelius in retirement.
NATO says Russia is ready to strike. Of course, Obama's BLM has already struck -- moving an army of soldiers on to a Nevada ranch to kill a few cows, capture Ma and Pa Kettle.
Uninterestingly, the WSJ reports that the "west" is divided over whether to do anything about Russia, the Crimean, the Ukraine. It's all about money, of course.
According to a report cited in the WSJ, air safety reaches new highs. The global accident rate for arline flights in 2013 was the lowest on record. Of course, one cannot count as accidents when pilots commit suicide/homicide by flying their planes into the ocean.
GM's recall costs keep rising.
Heartbleed bug found in Cisco routers, Juniper gear. This probably explains why my Yahoo!Mail service is down. I no longer get e-mail in real-time through Yahoo! Yahoo's outages are incredible. We're starting out another morning with Yahoo! being down I see.
This is why folks in Tennessee don't want to see their automotive plant unionized. Teamsters union members in Louisville, KY, overwhelmingly rejected a part of a contract iwth United Parcel Sercie, creating more headaches for the company as it looks to end months of labor negotiatins.
Regulators tell banks to plug "Heartbleed" security hole.
Natural-gas prices rise as supplies look lean.
The future of Dollar Stores is dire: the chain will close outlets; reflects rising competition fromthe likes of Wal-Mart and a falling rural population.
The Los Angeles Times
Crash kills ten (10); high school students on bus involved. Struck by a FedEx truck on I-5 in orthern California. Both drivers are killed; three chaperons are killed. Five students killed. The LA Times: Shortly after 5:30 p.m. Thursday, a FedEx truck crossed the grassy median that separates Interstate 5 here and slammed into the bus packed with students en route to visit Humboldt State University, about 200 miles north of the crash site." It looks like FedEx, like CBR, needs to put two drivers in the front cab to prevent single-point failures.
The South Bay high school superintendent, earning $675,000 last year, is put on leave. I assume "paid leave."
Finally, and long overdue, Rock Hall of Fame welcomes KISS, Nirvana, and Linda Ronstadt, among others. A must-read story.
Boeing will increase its workforce in Long Beach, Seal Beach.
HHS Sebelius resigns. Good riddance. Should have been top story. Buried at the bottom.
Pennsylvania school stabbing suspect "doesn't fit the mold." There's a mold for these psychopaths?
The Dickinson Press
Killdeer farmers, ranchers upset; want local CENEX to "start over." They say the CENEX caters too much to the oil field.
Sebelius: "I'm responsible for the debacle." Resigns. Truly the wicked witch of the west. (Previously the governor of Kansas. Clearly in over her head from the beginning, like most of Obama's administration.)